Nina and I both started work today. After piecing together a satalite view of the local area the day before, from google maps, Nina set out to find the places suggested to her by Sarah Sanders. Sarah visited Chongqing about 18 months ago – so whether these places still exist was yet to be discovered. Nina explored the local streets and the area surrounding the power station. I am amazed how easily she managed to find her way round, considering when we first arrived in Chongqing, every time we stepped out onto the main street outside our apartment, it looked completely different. We often struggled to find our way back to the supermarket, that we’d just visited hours before.
Nina found the bookshop, described by Sarah, where a group of very friendly students took her in and fed her tea and snacks. Sarah had given Nina the name of a girl who worked at the bookshop to say hello to. After making several phone calls the students couldn’t find out who this girl was, she must have moved on. The bookshop is also an artist’s studio and a gallery. Nina has promised to take me there soon.
Today was my first studio residency. I chose to do it in what is our studio, but what still, very much feels like Yan Yan’s studio. I started work at 9.30am, it was very slow progress. It is 18 months since I last did this project (in The Netherlands), it is difficult to reach the level of concentration that this work requires, especially when I’m still in and out of jet lag. Just as the work was starting to happen, there was a knock at the studio door and several people came in to whisk Nina and I off for a Korean BBQ in the centre of Chongqing. We returned at about 10. It is really important for me to keep these studio residencies to a single day, usually I stick roughly to office hours, today the limit had to be midnight. As with all the 1 day studio residencies, I have documented the day with a single photograph.
Jessica Longmore
15th November
Chongqing
Sunday
Sunday arrived accompanied by heavy rainfall that woke me up around 2am, continued all through the day and well into the night. The sound of the rain has been a constant low-level distraction during the day.
Here the rain does not serve to wash clear the streets, instead it seems to stick to and mingle with the other debris creating a slimy, slippery sludge. It’s very polluted in Chongqing and everywhere there are signs of heavy industry and construction. Less than 5 minutes walk from where we are staying there’s a huge power station with 2 chimneys belching out a constant greyness into the atmosphere. The air and the rain feel dirty.
Some things we did this Sunday:
Banked
Shopped
Pieced together a map of Huang Jue Ping district
Spoke to family back home
Spent time in the studio
In general, quite a fragmented day but not a bad one.
Time zones
Chongqing is 8 hours ahead of U.K time, we arrived here just over 2 days ago but it feels like more. My sense of time is totally skewed, the usual markers have been displaced, awake when I should be sleeping, not hungry at meal times, one eye on local time the other on U.K time waiting to call home. No Sunday early closing, in Chongqing it’s business as usual.
For now I’m enjoying the time warp.
Nina Chua
14 November 2010
Chongqing
4 Studios.
Today we visited 4 studios. Our studio, on loan from Yan Yan (the director of the 501) during our residency; Wang Jun’s studio, where we had tea and he invited me to spend a day in his studio sometime soon; The Sichuan Institute of Fine Art’s Sculpture Studio, an aircraft hanger of a building filled with sights I hardly know how to describe, with students working in ways I never expected, on a scale I never imagined. This involved the construction of three monumental pieces of commissioned public art, all being worked on by several students, all expertly choreographed by university staff. Rich, red clay, being batted and scraped into shape, by students all clambering over each other to get the perfect angle of the jaw, or crease of the trouser leg – surrounded by worryingly unstable stacks of uniformly grey studio furniture and discarded work.
Finally Xu Gangfu’s studio, the sculpture lecturer at Sichuan Institute of Fine Art, a classical sight, reminiscent of images from the Henry Moore Institute book: Sculptors in the Age of Photography (or something similar). An artist surrounded by his maquettes, his experiments, his sculptures, his drawings, his photographs of his sculptures, a model, his assistants sculpting the model, work in progress and work complete. All happily existing within a very small space.
Jessica Longmore
13 November 2010
Chongqing
I feel it is important to state our initial intentions for the residency at the start of this blog and record how each project changes throughout the progress of the residency.
Nina works in response to place and people as a curious observer of everyday life amid the flux of the city. She often works outside in abandoned urban spaces as a countermeasure to city life and the containment of the studio.
In Chongqing, Nina will locate places described to her by other artists who have also taken part in the 501 residency. To do this she will have to negotiate the fast pace of change in Chongqing and the fragmentary nature of the descriptions. Along the way Nina will find places to make work and claim them as her temporary studio.
My practice involves a series of sculptural gestures, which respond to the psychology of the studio. For Chongqing, I have devised Objects for a Studio, a project where I spend a single day creating work in other artists’ studios, using only the objects I encounter there. By placing myself in the highly personal domain of another artist, for a very short time, I hope to provoke the extremes of emotion that the studio creates, and stimulate the production of new work. I will document each studio day with a single photograph.
Mine and Nina’s practice is ephemeral; based on experience and situation. We propose to approach the Chongqing residency as individual artists, but to bear witness to each others work, and seek to convey this to an audience.
We arrived in China on Tuesday 9th November and spent a few days in Beijing visiting galleries and tourist attractions. We flew to Chongqing 3 days later. Our blog starts on our first full day in Chongqing, Saturday 13th November. We have decided to meet at the end of each day of our residency, over a cup of tea, to discuss the events of the day. We will then alternately document the key aspects of this discussion on this blog. As we cannot always access the a-n website in China, we will upload posts retrospectively and include the date on which they were written.
Jessica Longmore
13 November 2010
Chongqing
